Today’s Old Testament reading is the lovely story of Abraham and Sarah extending hospitality to three strangers, who prove to be angels that bless the aging couple with a child. “Then cherish pity,” I hear Blake saying, “lest you drive an angel from your door.” Those so-called Christians who have signed on to the White House’s demonization of immigrants should realize that they are driving away throngs of angels. Here’s the reading (Genesis 18:1-15, 21:1-7):
The Lord appeared to Abraham by the oaks of Mamre, as he sat at the entrance of his tent in the heat of the day. He looked up and saw three men standing near him. When he saw them, he ran from the tent entrance to meet them, and bowed down to the ground. He said, “My lord, if I find favor with you, do not pass by your servant. Let a little water be brought, and wash your feet, and rest yourselves under the tree. Let me bring a little bread, that you may refresh yourselves, and after that you may pass on—since you have come to your servant.” So they said, “Do as you have said.” And Abraham hastened into the tent to Sarah, and said, “Make ready quickly three measures of choice flour, knead it, and make cakes.” Abraham ran to the herd, and took a calf, tender and good, and gave it to the servant, who hastened to prepare it. Then he took curds and milk and the calf that he had prepared, and set it before them; and he stood by them under the tree while they ate.
They said to him, “Where is your wife Sarah?” And he said, “There, in the tent.” Then one said, “I will surely return to you in due season, and your wife Sarah shall have a son.” And Sarah was listening at the tent entrance behind him. Now Abraham and Sarah were old, advanced in age; it had ceased to be with Sarah after the manner of women. So Sarah laughed to herself, saying, “After I have grown old, and my husband is old, shall I have pleasure?” The Lord said to Abraham, “Why did Sarah laugh, and say, ‘Shall I indeed bear a child, now that I am old?’ Is anything too wonderful for the Lord? At the set time I will return to you, in due season, and Sarah shall have a son.” But Sarah denied, saying, “I did not laugh”; for she was afraid. He said, “Oh yes, you did laugh.”…
The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised. Sarah conceived and bore Abraham a son in his old age, at the time of which God had spoken to him. Abraham gave the name Isaac to his son whom Sarah bore him. And Abraham circumcised his son Isaac when he was eight days old, as God had commanded him. Abraham was a hundred years old when his son Isaac was born to him. Now Sarah said, “God has brought laughter for me; everyone who hears will laugh with me.” And she said, “Who would ever have said to Abraham that Sarah would nurse children? Yet I have borne him a son in his old age.”]
Malcolm Guite counsels us to be like Abraham and Sarah and to “practice hospitality.” Our hearts, he writes, will be “free flowing only as [we] take another’s part.” He suggests that the two are stuck—“Stopped in themselves, and in their own unknowing”—with their barrenness is one form that this stuckness has taken. I think of how immigrants bring new life and new energy to our own country and how we become static and ingrown when we drive them away.
Strangers unlock us so that we can breathe again, and the courtesy we extend them “begets the unexpected; generosity/ Begetting generation, as the seed/ Of promise springs and laughs in Sarah’s womb.” Waves of immigrants have, time after time, reinvigorated America. When we make room for them under our shade, we ourselves are made whole. To have access to creation’s “secret source,” we must ourselves become a “wellspring in the wilderness.”
Or to borrow from another poem, we must lift our lamp beside the golden door.
Abraham and Sarah at Mamre By Malcolm Guite
They practice hospitality; their hearts Have opened like a secret source, free flowing Only as they take another’s part. Stopped in themselves, and in their own unknowing, But unlocked by these strangers in their need, They breathe again, and courtesy, set free, Begets the unexpected; generosity Begetting generation, as the seed Of promise springs and laughs in Sarah’s womb.
Made whole by their own hospitality, And like the rooted oak whose shade makes room For this refreshing genesis at Mamre, One couple, bringing comfort to their guests, Becomes our wellspring in the wilderness.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 38th Installment
Between the normally hapless New York Knicks overcoming the largest finals deficit in NBA history and the world’s largest sporting event coming to North America, I examine today the importance of sports in my life. What have playing and watching taught me about myself?
As a child I was fairly hapless when it came to athletics, other than being one of the fastest kids in my class. I didn’t play football, which in rural Tennessee is a religion, nor did I play basketball. I did long to play baseball but my parents didn’t know about Little League so that didn’t happen. My grandmother, to whom I had expressed my yearning, once bought me a glove and a ball, but the ball was a softball, not a baseball, which ruined the mitt.
Fortunately my parents signed me up for tennis lessons when I was 11 and I fell in love.
I like to say that tennis and academics saved my life when I entered the Sewanee Military Academy after returning from an idyllic year in France. Drilling, marching, getting hazed, and undergoing rigorous uniform inspections were hell for me, and it didn’t help that I was the shortest kid in my entire high school, as well as suffering from the worst case of acne my dermatologist said he had ever seen (acne conglobate). To make matters worse, because uniforms were expensive, my parents acquired castoffs that were too large for me, making me look like Sad Sack in the World War II comic strip.
I was sustained by reading The Iliad in my freshman English class and playing for the junior varsity tennis team, however. At one point I even wrote a tennis poem, which went on to become my only literary publication when it appeared in a national collection of high school poems. I suspect it was influenced by the imagism of H.D. and Archibald MacLeish:
The Tennis Players
Their flapping figures Expanding and contracting Like sheets upon a windblown clothesline Over an asphalt lawn Of green
My senior year I was #4 on the tennis ladder and won all but two of my matches. Although we had a fine team, we couldn’t compete with Baylor High School in Chattanooga, which that year had Roscoe Tanner (who would one day reach the Wimbledon finals) and Brian Gottfried (who would reach a French Open final and win two French Open doubles). I remember thinking that Gottfried had the most beautiful backhand I had ever seen and determined to develop one like it. He was like a clockwork figure in an exquisite 18th century music box, and when I went on to specialize in literature from the French and British 18th centuries—and learned about the era’s passion for clocks, music boxes, and mechanical toys—I always thought of the moment when I saw Gottfried warming up.
There’s a point to my bringing up 18th century clockwork here because my love of tennis is related to my choice of 18thcentury British literature as my graduate school focus. For a while, I equated that exquisite tennis stroke, and the sport in general, with the exquisite universe that 18th century deists believed an almighty clockmaker had set in motion. Along the same lines, I was fascinated by the mechanical doll Olympia that appears in Jacques Offenbach’s opera Tales of Hoffman; my favorite opera was Mozart’s Magic Flute (which has a music box quality);and my favorite film was Jean Renoir’s Rules of the Game, which was partially inspired by two intricate 18th century plays, Alfred de Musset’s Les Caprices de Marianne and clockmaker playwright Beaumarchais’s Marriage of Figaro. In the film, not surprisingly, there’s a character who collects 18th century music boxes.
[I add as an aside that my English professor son, Tobias Wilson-Bates, is doing exciting research on clocks, machines, and time travel literature in the 19th century. Among other things, he is showing that readers resorted to gothic ghost stories to understand the age’s bewildering technological innovations, including the telegraph, electricity, and the steam engine, and that scientists resorted to such stories to conceptualize their discoveries (e.g., Maxwell’s demon).]
Given my love of controlled elegance, is it any wonder that my favorite athlete of all time is Roger Federer, whose balletic grace took him further than it otherwise might have in an age dominated by powerful serves, heavy topspin groundstrokes, and dogged retrieval. Novelist David Foster Wallace once described Federer as “a religious experience,” to which I would only add that it’s a highly ceremonial religious experience.
When I reached graduate school and immersed myself in 18th century figures, I became more ambivalent about my fascination with clockwork. This was partly because I encountered Romantic attacks on mechanistic thinking, such as William Blake’s critique in “There Is No Natural Religion”:
The bounded is loathed by its possessor. The same dull round even of a universe would soon become a mill with complicated wheels.
John Keats, meanwhile, accused Newton of having “destroyed all the poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to the prismatic colors,” while Percy Shelley distinguished between analysis and synthesis, between “mere reasoning” and the poetic imagination. These critiques I linked up with Nicholas Fox Weber’s The Art of Tennis, which argues that breaking tennis down to its constituent parts actually makes your game worse. Feel your strokes, don’t analyze them, he counsels, and I worried that my tennis suffered because I was too much inside my head.
I also wondered if Marshall McLuhan was correct when, in Understanding Media (1964), he opined that intellectuals can’t be great tennis players because they take a linear rather than a wholistic approach to the sport.
For all my mixed feelings, however, I really am a child of the Enlightenment. And while, for whatever reason, I’m not a great tennis player and have never claimed to be, I am an enthusiastic one. I may not be fit even to untie one of Federer’s tennis sneakers, but my imagination used to soar when I watched him. Years later, tennis analyst Peter Bodo helped me understand why I found him so transcendent.
Bodo uses the concept of sprezzatura to describe Federer. He borrows the idea from Mark Kingwell’s Catch and Release, a book about flyfishing, which defines sprezzatura as follows:
“Grace” doesn’t quite capture its extension, though that’s part of it. Nor ‘elegance’ either, though again it is partly right. Vitality and lightness are implied, but sprezzatura is more than gaiety. It’s that exhibition of relaxed competence, almost of insouciance, in amateur pursuit of one’s goal. . .
Kingwell notes that the quality of sprezzatura is no longer prized as much as it was in previous eras, finding it in figures like the Cavalier poets of the 17th century (for instance, Sir John Suckling and Richard Lovelace). Bodo makes the same observation about Federer, observing that he seems like a throwback to a much earlier age. He contrasts him with
the bullishness of Guillermo Vilas, the toughness of Ivan Lendl, the fire of a John McEnroe, the explosive power of a Pete Sampras, that subtle communication of menace that informed the glowering visage of Pancho Gonzalez, or the scary, almost rodent-like bloodlust of Jimmy Connors. But all pale alongside the easy, it’s-no-big-deal domination with which Federer rules.
I remember being heartbroken when Argentinian giant Juan Del Potro used his power to defeat Federer in a U.S. Open final because I felt like the future of tennis lay in brute force. It was like the contest between the boxer and the yokel that Ralph Ellison describes in the opening pages of invisible Man:
Once I saw a prizefighter boxing a yokel. The fighter was swift and amazingly scientific. His body was one violent flow of rapid rhythmic action. He hit the hokel a hundred times while the yokel held up his arms in stunned surprise. But suddenly the yokel, rolling about in the gale of boxing gloves, struck one blow and knocked science, speed and footwork as cold as a well-digger’s posterior.
Many of my most prized sports-watching moments have been watching Federer play. As for my own skills, although I only have a rough simulacrum of Gottfried’s one-handed backhand, it is the strongest part of my game. And although my tennis wasn’t good enough to make Carleton’s team, my love has for the sport has never waned. Sewanee’s indoor courts factored into our retirement decision, and I now run a doubles league where I schedule 25 ardent tennis players in daily doubles matches. Julia and I have also been paying for our Georgia grandchildren to take lesson for several years now, and my reward is that I can now have extended rallies with the three girls, with my seven-year-old grandson waiting in the wings.
I now switch from tennis to soccer, which all three of our sons played, and to baseball, which engaged Justin and Darien. Darien also played tennis—he can now beat me—while Toby added lacrosse to soccer before moving on the St. Mary’s rowing team. I carry around, like precious artifacts, certain memories of them competing.
For instance, I remember Justin at 13 racing in from centerfield and diving to catch a rapidly sinking line drive. Even more vividly, I remember him that same season hitting a game-tying double in the final inning of a night game. A beautiful Dabney Stuart poem, even though it is about football, helps me frame that moment:
Ties By Dabney Stuart
When I faded back to pass Late in the game, as one Who has been away some time Fades back into memory, My father, who had been nodding At home by the radio, Would wake, asking My mother, who had not Been listening, “What’s the score?” And she would answer, “Tied,” While the pass I threw Hung high in the brilliant air Beneath the dark, like a star.
Justin may be long gone—sometimes I am like those drowsy parents and don’t think of him for days—but then that moment will unexpectedly fade back into memory. I see him as I see that ball, hanging suspended in the dark sky as the air around it shimmers.
If Justin was lanky elegance, Darien was concentrated power. One moment that stands out was his performance as a Little League catcher in a game that would determine the conference championship. We were up a run with two outs in the final inning when the batter foul tipped a two-out pitch. I saw it as uncatchable and figured we would have to endure another pitch—only to see Darien launch himself, an intense and furious explosion, against the backstop in a desperate attempt to bring it in. He seemed to fill my whole field of vision, and even though he missed it and it would take another pitch to end the game, I remember thinking that there’s nothing Darien won’t go all-out for. I was in awe of him then and I am still in awe of him as that moment pretty much epitomizes his approach to life. I can say of him as Cassius says of Caesar (but without Cassius’s sarcasm), “Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.”
Finally there was Toby, who avoided the limelight that his brothers courted, choosing instead to quietly go about his job. As one of his high school team’s fullbacks, he did his job very well, but for a while I seemed to be the only one who noticed that opposing players never scored on his side of the field. I was deeply gratified, then, when a visiting professional coach from England saw him practicing with the college team, recognized his skill, and chose him for a scrimmage.
A couple of stanzas from Marge Piercy’s “To Be of Use” come to mind when I remember Toby on the soccer pitch:
I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart, who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience, who strain in the mud and muck to move things forward, who do what has to be done, again and again.
I want to be with people who submerge in the task, who go into the fields to harvest and work in a row and pass the bags along, who are not parlor generals and field deserters but move in a common rhythm when the food must come in or the fire be put out.
What I love about sports is that, along with the wonderful companionship, it provides feedback within a framed experience. Where else do we get such instant results to learn from? Perhaps it’s no accident that I married a woman who played starting guard for Carleton’s basketball team.
Oh, and as for our current sports: my nostalgia for the old Knicks team of Bill Bradley, Clyde Frazier, and Willis Reid has me rooting for New York. And since my first language was French and I have a long history with that country, “Allez les bleus!”
I write today on an important University of Ljubljana dissertation I helped supervise and that our committee recently approved. In her study of biopunk, Majda Nizamič has shown the importance of dystopian science fiction—Margaret Atwood calls it speculative fiction–in helping us negotiate our greatest technological challenges. Novels, Majda makes clear, can go places where expository writing comes up short.
She explains that the biopunk genre “deals with biotechnology, depicting a futuristic society that misuses biotechnology to gain power and exert control.” The genre can be seen to have originated in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), but it took on new life following breakthroughs in DNA science. Biopunk focuses on such issues as genetic engineering, human enhancement, synthetic biology, artificial intelligence, bioterrorism, and posthuman evolution. Its authors often show that, unchecked, biotechnology can lead to ecological collapse and even the annihilation of the human race.
Biopunk is particularly interested in genetic engineering. Of the four novels that Majda examines, Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake looks at splicing and gene editing, Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl at agri-tech, Greg Bear’s Blood Music at intelligent cells, and Jeff Vendermeer’s Borne at various forms of enhancement biotech. Because she limits her study to North American works, Madja didn’t mention Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-nominated Never Let Me Go but it also fits the genre.
I am most familiar with Oryx, having taught it multiple times in my nature-themed Intro to Lit class. Here’s Atwood’s description of pigs raised with organs that can be used as transplants:
The goal of the pigoon project was to grow an assortment of foolproof human tissue organs in a transgenic knockout pig host—organs that would transplant smoothly and avoid rejection, but would also be able to fight off attacks by opportunistic microbes and viruses, of which there were more strains every year. A rapid maturing gene was spliced in so the pigoon kidneys and livers and hearts would be ready sooner, and now they were perfecting a pigoon that could grow five or six kidneys at a time. Such a host animal could be reaped of its extra kidneys then, rather than being destroyed. It could keep on living and growing more organs, much as a lobster could grow another claw to replace a missing one. That would be less wasteful as it took a lot of food and care to grow a pigoon. A great deal of investment money had gone into OrganInc Farms.
In addition to pigoons, ethically-challenged scientists in Atwood’s novel have created other new species, including rakunks (raccoons and skunks), wolvogs (wolves and dogs), phosphorescent rabbits, liobams (lions and lambs), and caterpillars with smiley faces:
The rakunks had begun as an after-hours hobby on the part of the OrganInc biolab hotshots. There’d been a lot of fooling around in those days: create-an-animal was so much fun, said the guys doing it; it made you feel like God. A number of the experiments were destroyed because they were too dangerous to have around—who needed a cane toad with a prehensile tail like a chameleon’s that might climb in through the bathroom window and blind you while you were brushing your teeth? Then there was the snat, an unfortunate blend of snake and rat: they’d had to get rid of those. But the rakunks caught on as pets, inside OrganInc.
The cosmetics industry also gets involved:
There were pigoons at NooSkins, just as at OrganInc Farms, but these were smaller and were being used to develop skin-related biotechnologies. The main idea was to find a method of replacing the older epidermis with a fresh one, not a laser-thinned or dermabraded short-term resurfacing but a genuine start-over skin that would be wrinkle- and blemish-free. For that, it would be useful to grow a young, plump skin cell that would eat up the worn cells in the skins of those on whom it was planted and replace them with replicas of itself, like algae growing on a pond.
Majda writes that we should think of biopunk as thought experiments that “aid us in imagining the improbable, or even impossible, which deepen our understanding and comprehension of the world around and from within us.” She says that although we may derive some comfort that this hasn’t happened yet, there’s always the possibility that the novels are predictive. Indeed, if the once vibrant genre of cyberpunk has fallen off, to be replaced by biopunk, it’s because computers taking over our lives now seems normal rather than a futurist nightmare.
In her conclusion, Majda asks a number of important questions, including
— Will humans become more human or less so, more biological or less, over time? –What are the consequences of unbridled use of biotechnology, such as genetic engineering and splicing? –Are we on the path of remaking humanity? –Might we at some point also be talking about a “synthetica sapiens” which will come to replace homo sapiens?
Returning to Oryx and Crake after a decade away from it, I was dispirited by how much closer we are to the world Atwood depicts. In her dystopia, large corporations and big money run everything, regulations have been swept away so that laissez faire capitalism reigns supreme, and great gaps have opened between the super wealthy and everyone else. We were well on our way to this America prior to Trump, but his pay-to-play policies, along with Project 2025, have accelerated the process.
Majda quotes one passage from the book which helps explain the rise of vaccine skepticism and Robert Kennedy’s “Make America Healthy Again” schtick. If you can’t trust the pharmaceutical giants, then why not “do your own research” and opt for your own remedies? The advice comes from a survivalist who is living off the land:
Now, promise me that you will never take any pill made by a Corporation. Never buy such a pill, and never accept any such pill if offered, no matter what they say. They’ll produce data and scientists; they’ll produce doctors – worthless, they’ve all been bought.’ ‘Surely not all of them!’ said Toby, shocked by Pilar’s vehemence: she was usually so calm. ‘No,’ said Pilar. ‘Not all. But all who are still working with any of the Corporations. The others – some have died unexpectedly. But those still alive – those with any shred of the old medical ethic left in them …’ She paused. ‘There are doctors like that, still. But not at the Corps’.
It turns out that, in this instance, Pilar is right since there is a mad scientist who creates a pill that kills practically all of the world’s humans (although Toby and Pilar escape). In the case of MAHA, unfortunately, skeptics are rejecting legitimate science, which in turn is leading to the return of measles, whooping cough, and other diseases we had all but stamped out. Also, thanks to Elon Musk’s DOGE boys, we’re seeing the return of screw worms in our cattle and Ebola in Africa.
Majda’s dissertation needs to get out into the world because it shows that the novels it treats are grappling with foundational questions. As I read through it, I thought of a Laguna elder’s admonition at the beginning of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony:
I will tell you something about stories, [he said] They aren’t just for entertainment. Don’t be fooled. They are all we have, you see, all we have to fight off illness and death. You don’t have anything if you don’t have the stories.
“While America Burns, Trump Builds Himself a Colosseum,” Thom Hartmann declares on his blog The Hartmann Report before citing the Roman poet Juvenal. “The UFC spectacle is more than a cage fight;” he writes; “it’s a monument to corruption, self-enrichment, and the imperial Roman politics of bread and circus.”
Referring to Satire X: The Vanity of Human Wishes, Hartmann elaborates:
There’s an ancient phrase for governing this way, and it isn’t a compliment. The Roman poet Juvenal, watching his republic rot into empire, sneered that a people who once handed out commands and legions had shrunk their whole appetite down to two things, panem et circenses, bread and circuses.
Keep the mob fed and entertained with a little blood, and they’ll never notice the men in charge stripping the place down to the studs.
Vanity of Human Wishes was much admired by such satirists as John Dryden, Jonathan Swift, and Samuel Johnson. (Johnson’s greatest poem, “The Vanity of Human Wishes,” is a brilliant imitation.) Given Rome’s record of emperors since Augustus, Juvenal is understandably more acerbic than his gentle forerunner Horace, and while I myself have always leaned more towards Horatian satire, DJT has threatened to make a Juvenalian out of me.
Satire X is broken into such sections as “Be Careful What You Ask For,” “The Emptiness of Power,” “The Penalties of a Long Life,” and “And as for Good Looks.” The bread and circuses line appears in “Emptiness of Power” and refers to the fickle mob.
The context is the fall of Sejanus, the head of the Praetorian Guard for 17 years and counselor to the emperor Tiberius. When Tiberius retired to Capri, Sejanus took over administrative control of the empire. Juvenal observes that if Fate, in the figure of the Etruscan goddess Nortia, has ruled differently, Sejanus might even have become emperor. Instead, upon orders from Capri, he was accused of treason and executed. Juvenal describes the mob’s reaction to the fall of men in high positions:
The wheels of their chariots are smashed, and broken to pieces, With axes, while the legs of their innocent horses are shattered. Now the flames roar, the bellows hiss, and the head idolized By the people glows in the furnace, flames crackle around the huge Sejanus, the face of the man who was number two in the world Is converted to jugs and basins, turned to pots and frying pans. Deck your houses with laurel, lead a great bull whitened with Chalk up to the Capitol: come see Sejanus dragged along by A hook, everyone’s celebrating! “Look at the lips, look at the Face on that! You can take it from me, he was never a man That I liked.” “But what was the crime that brought him down?! Who informed, what’s the evidence, where are the witnesses?” “That’s all irrelevant; a lengthy and wordy letter arrived from Capri.” “That’s fine answer enough.”
I think of how a mob suddenly turned on Vice President Mike Pence, brought in to shore up Trump’s evangelical base, in response to a not-so-wordy directive from the White House. Other men and women elevated by Trump should take note.
Whether this mob will ever turn on Trump himself remains to be seen. They have certainly failed to live up to the informed citizenry that Thomas Jefferson envisioned as the bulwark of democracy. Here’s Juvenal again, hearkening back to a time when the people—or at least the Senate—had a say in Roman affairs:
They shed their sense of responsibility Long ago, when they lost their votes, and the bribes; the mob That used to grant power, high office, the legions, everything, Curtails its desires, and reveals its anxiety for two things only, Bread and circuses.
Two thousand years ago Juvenal foresaw how politics as entertainment would replace politics as civic responsibility.
What’s striking about Trump is that he provides only entertainment. As Hartmann sardonically notes
,The Roman emperors understood the deal they were making with the public: bread and circuses, panem et circenses, the cheap grain and the gladiator games delivered together, because if you fed them and entertained them they wouldn’t ask awkward questions about the empire. Trump has inverted the formula. He’s keeping the circus and taking away the bread.
I wonder if even some in MAGA will see a privately staged cage fight as degrading “the people’s house.”
At the end of his satire, Juvenal tells us what we should wish for in an era of greed and self-aggrandizement. You’ve probably heard it: Mens sana in corpore sano or “a healthy mind and a sound body”:
You should pray for a healthy mind in a healthy body. Ask for a stout heart that has no fear of death, and deems length of days the least of Nature’s gifts that can endure any kind of toil, that knows neither wrath nor desire and thinks the woes and hard labors of Hercules better than the loves and banquets and downy cushions of Sardanapalus. What I commend to you, you can give to yourself; For assuredly, the only road to a life of peace is virtue.
Imagine if we all dedicated ourselves to living a life of virtue.
Added note: During Trump’s first term I applied Samuel Johnson’s imitation of Satire X to him and his sycophants. Think of figures like Pam Bondi, Kristi Noem, and Tulsi Gabbard in the following lines:
Unnumber’d suppliants crowd Preferment’s gate, Athirst for wealth, and burning to be great; Delusive Fortune hears th’ incessant call, They mount, they shine, evaporate and fall. On every stage the foes of peace attend, Hate dogs their flight, and Insult mocks their end.
Cooper and Cumming as plotters Antonio and Sebastian
Tuesday
My faculty book group just finished discussing The Tempest, the last play in our Shakespeare binge, undertaken before Sewanee’s Shakespearen, Pamela Macfie, moves to Maine. For years a beloved professor, Pamela previously led us in discussions of Hamlet, King Lear, Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Twelfth Night. As we talked about the drama that many consider to be the Bard’s farewell to theater, I recalled teaching itat the University of Ljubljana only hours after learning that Trump had defeated Kamala Harris.
In the course of election night, I kept changing the post I was writing on Shakespeare’s play. When it was fairly clear that Trump would emerge victorious, I introduced my essay with the following (slightly amended) note:
If today’s essay is a bit uneven, it’s because–writing it from Slovenia–I started it fairly confident that Kamala Harris would win the election, only to begin realizing we were witnessing 2016 redux as the night wore on. What Shakespeare designed as a comic if somewhat disturbing subplot in Shakespeare’s final play–inept insurrectionists trying to overthrow Prospero, destroy his magic book, and seize Miranda–suddenly became our central action. It was as if The Tempest had transmuted into Richard III. (Think of Prospero’s book as the Constitution, Miranda as reproductive freedom.) In the course of the night, my headline changed from “Caliban vs. Prospero” to “Can Caliban Defeat Prospero?” to (sadly) “Caliban Defeats Prospero.” Following Trump’s victory, white nationalist Nick Fuentes gloated, in a tweet that received 22,000 likes, “Your body, my choice. Forever.” Or as Caliban fantasizes after Prospero reminds him that he “didst seek to violate the honor of my child,”
O ho, O ho! would’t had been done! Thou didst prevent me; I had peopled else This isle with Calibans.
When I walked into class the following morning, I noticed that every one of my students was scrutinizing me for my reaction. How would an American respond to the dreadful news? Because I have always been careful to keep my politics out of my classes—after all, I have conservative as well as liberal students—I didn’t say much, but the students could tell my heart wasn’t in my teaching. Halfway through the class, I discovered I couldn’t go on and ended early, something I never do.
Reexamining the play a year and a half later, I find it more relevant than ever, despite its being a comedy. As Trump and various Republicans look for ways to steal the upcoming Congressional elections, it’s useful to remember that the play features a string of coups and attempted coups. First there is Antonio, Prospero’s brother, overthrowing him with the aid of Alonso, king of Naples. Prospero is cast adrift with his daughter Miranda, and only with the aid of his magical books, provided him by the kindly Gonzalo, is he able to survive.
Then Prospero himself seizes the island from Caliban. Although the monster claims ownership, however—“This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother, which thou takest from me”—it is worth noting that Sycorax herself stole the island from Ariel, whom she imprisoned in a tree. Caliban is like those white supremacists who contend that their America is being stolen from them without acknowledging others who have equal or even prior claim.
Shakespeare is not done with takeover attempts. First, Antonio suggests to Sebastian that they kill Alonso, Sebastian’s brother, in a repeat of Antonio’s seizure of power. That way Antonio will free himself of the debt he owes to Naples. Then there’s Caliban plotting with jester Trinculo and butler Stephano to kill Prospero and wed Miranda. Caliban has a variety of different plans for doing this, just as Trump has multiple ideas about stealing the next election, from seizing voter rolls and voting machines to creating racist gerrymanders to posting ICE agents at polling places to having the postal service intervene. Note how Caliban too fantasizes about the many ways he can overthrow Prospero.
Perhaps we can think of Prospero’s books as the Constitution, without which America is “but a sot, as I am, nor hath not one spirit to command.” Indeed, democracy rests upon the Constitution.
Fortunately for Prospero, the insurgents are as inept as those who stormed the Capitol on January 6. As I noted in my original post, when Stephano and Trinculo get to Prospero’s cave, they behave like those who wandered around the building taking selfies, trashing Nancy Pelosi’s office, and looting souvenirs. In this case, they put on Prospero’s garments, infuriating Caliban, who understands Prospero’s power:
The dropsy drown this fool I what do you mean To dote thus on such luggage? Let’s alone And do the murder first: if he awake, From toe to crown he’ll fill our skins with pinches, Make us strange stuff.
Caliban himself is like those MAGA fanatics whose cult-like devotion to their leader blind them to his buffoonery. Caliban has attached himself to Stephano in part because he is intoxicated with his liquor—”I’ll swear upon that bottle to be thy true subject; for the liquor is not earthly”—and Trump’s supporters experience a similar high. Only at the end does Caliban realize that he has sworn allegiance to an idiot:
We’ve been praying for a while that Trump voters will experience their own remorse.
The character of Prospero is worth examining further given our own situation. He has taken his eyes off the ball once already, failing to anticipate Antonio’s coup, and he may be naïve in thinking that all will work out in the future if he simply forgives his enemies. Here he is with his usurping brother:
One can see some of the same naiveté in his daughter. When she delivers her best-known line—“How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,/ That has such people in’t!”—three of the four she is looking at are coup plotters. One also sees such naiveté in Gonzalo, who believes that they have landed in an Edenic paradise but fails to acknowledge—as Sebastian and Antonio do–the power dynamics that are always present in human society.
Will all go well once Prospero magnanimously breaks his staff and drowns his book? To this point, he has been able to maintain social order because he can in fact command a spirit. In a way, Prospero is like those who believe our Constitutional democracy has sufficient safeguards to ward off threats. But without Ariel orchestrating a happy ending, Sebastian and Antonio would kill Alonso and Gonzalo and the Caliban crew would kill Prospero. When the magician says to Alonso, “Two of these fellows you/ Must know and own; this thing of darkness!/ Acknowledge mine,” he could be reminding us today that, for all our idealism, America has always had a Caliban side.
In other words, I can look at Trump and say, “This thing of darkness! Acknowledge mine.” He did not arise ex nihilo but is a manifestation of a strain that has been with us since the beginning.
The good news is that, although that darkness prevailed in 2024 election (barely), it doesn’t have to get the last word. “We are such stuff as dreams are made on,” Prospero famously says, and America’s Constitutional democracy is also made on a dream. In the play, rightful rulers Ferdinand and Miranda represent a new hope.
Whether our own usurpers will be defeated by people committed to a multicultural society is the question of the hour.
A recent Tempest citation: Blogger Phil Williams, in his column Hate Comes to Main Street, borrows the line “Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows” to describe a disturbing attempt by neo-Nazis to assume control of the Southern Baptist Convention. and neo-Nazis. Apparently William Wolfe, executive director of the Center for Baptist Leadership, is push blood and soil politics, KKK genetic theories, and a Baptist version of Sharia Law. Although the group has not yet taken over the SBC, they are making a concerted push.
The “strange bedfellows” reference, which originated with Shakespeare, is to the strangest scene in the play. Trinculo, to escape the rain, crawls under the gaberdine under which Caliban is hiding, even though he smells strongly of fish. Stephano, coming upon the pair, thinks he is witnessing “some monster of the isle with four legs.” When he hears the voice of a companion he believes he has drowned, he is utterly confused. As are those of us who see a man quoting Christ in the cause of cultural genoicide.
It sounds like the SBC has not yet joined forces with Wolfe as Caliban does with Trinculo and Stephano. “Strange bedfellows,” however, already describes Trump’s alliance with Christian evangelicals, so Williams’s warning should not be taken lightly.
Reaffirming our wedding vows after 50 years (and in our original—albeit slightly altered—wedding garb!)
Monday
Today Julia and I celebrate our 53rd wedding anniversary. When I asked her if I could share something she wrote about bringing up our sons, she suggested the poem below instead. “If I Go First” was penned a little over a year ago, shortly after Julia. experienced a stroke that put her in the hospital for three days. Although she emerged relatively unscathed, her brush with mortality led her to pen this love note. She imagined me finding it on her computer if she suddenly passed away.
While there are other reasons to survey and reflect on one’s marriage, the rattle of bones gives a special urgency to the exercise. The poem begins with our meeting at Carleton College (our senior year I edited the Carletonian while Julia was the arts editor); journeys on to graduate school in Atlanta; mentions a trip to France (Julia’s first venture abroad); and then takes us to our jobs, first at Morehouse College (for me) and a Decatur middle school (for her) before ending up in southern Maryland, where I and then eventually she taught for St. Mary’s College of Maryland. In both Atlanta and Maryland we lived in Black communities, and one of the caregivers with the voice of an angel was William Boyd, a music major from inner city Baltimore who lived with us for four years. He then journeyed with us to Yugoslavia, where he sang gospel in major concert halls in Zagreb and Sarajevo.
Of course, losing our eldest son is mentioned. (The secret society is parents who have lost a child.) The poem ends with the two of us paired one-on-one, as we were in the beginning, our other sons having departed to form families of their own.
To borrow a Philip Larkin image but using it very differently than he does, a good marriage deepens like a continental shelf. The passage of years has worn away various sharp edges and there comes a time when (now I’m stealing from Ezra Pound) “I desired my dust to be mingled with yours/ Forever and forever, and forever.” Not that we’re in the dust state yet (I hope). Just very good friends and essential supporters as well as lovers.
If I Go First By Julia Bates
If I go first Then here in some small way I want to tell you about All you have given me
We began our relationship As a team on a weekly college paper You as editor Me following the arts| We learned to listen To guide To create a small community Of creatives, the first of many
We followed family As we always would Even those times when Our neglected parents Sent fill in the blank Post cards to establish That we still lived
We studied We taught We played scrabble And held weekly Supper clubs Another community of Twenty somethings who Were grimly unsure that We could save the world But would not give up trying
You took me across oceans and into The thicket of a language I thought I knew from School. HAH! But we garnered Chocolates and cheese And I finally knew what Abroad meant.
And then children As a choice Though my father groaned He would never see his grandchildren And died to prove his point I had played him the sound Of the heartbeat of my first son A month before he died.
Big graduations And first jobs In places Where white skin Stood out And finally a place that Anchored us firmly in the south In a neighborhood that taught us how to Raise children in diversity With caregivers who had voices of angels
Children grow up They grow away With varying degrees of Anger, resistance, and distaste And at a river’s edge The oldest died In cold sunshine And in the following weeks The four of us stood alone Together
And we haunted poems For warmth and Assurance that whether We wanted to or not We would live Part of a secret society No one wants to join
Healing has come As guilt has weathered away. What we did or did not do Is beside the point We turned to love And the sons who Stood beside us Through it all. And you continued to shower Us with words in that Magic way you have of finding A thought here, an event there, Connected to a past writer All loops threaded in that sweet mind Of yours.
In joy our sons have Formed families Of their own And we are back to Two table settings Two suitcases for travel Not twelve Navy duffels Two for walks Two for the pew in church
And if you are reading this At some point You will be sitting alone But surrounded by all who We have touched By the web of love That still holds And I send you my deepest Love from whatever new Place I occupy To keep you warm To let you know you were Always the greatest gift You could have given me.
I’m very glad that I didn’t have to wait for Julia to die to read this. It has led us to reminisce together, perhaps the best thing one can do to celebrate an anniversary.
It’s no surprise that the Christian right is losing its mind over Texas senate candidate James Talarico. Liberals aren’t supposed to quote Jesus when they campaign (or, for that matter, ever). Still, even I was taken aback when Mike Lee, a vitriolic Mormon senator from Utah, accused him of being in thrall to Moloch, the Palestinian god to whom babies were supposedly sacrificed. The accusation sends me back to Alan Ginsberg’s “Howl,” written in 1955-56, where Moloch stands in for an America that is destroying “the best minds of my generation.” From the poet’s perspective, the real Moloch is the America that Trump & Co. want to return us to.
The Moloch accusation arises from Talarico’s support for a woman’s right to an abortion. As Talarico said to Stephen Colbert in an interview that CBS banned after pressure from Trump,
[T]he religious right … convinced a lot of our fellow Christians that the most important issues were abortion and gay marriage, two issues that aren’t mentioned in the Bible. Two issues that Jesus never talked about. Jesus in Matthew 25 tells us exactly how you and I and … our fellow believers [are] going to be judged and how we’re going to be saved: by feeding the hungry, by healing the sick, by welcoming the stranger. Nothing about going to church. Nothing about voting Republican. It was all about how you treat other people.
Talarico believes that creation is a matter of freedom and consent and that abortion is consistent with Christian values. After all, he argues, God asked for, and received, Mary’s permission to impregnate her. John Stoehr at Editorial Board, to whom I owe this information, notes that this used to be taken for granted by Protestants. And although Catholics have always been against abortion, Pope Leo recently made the same point, that Christians make a mistake when they prioritize abortion over the Sermon on the Mount or Matthew 25:40-45 (“whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me”).
In my opinion, the right wing’s “right to life” obsession has more to do with controlling women than with honoring life, for which they show little interest. As Stoehr observes, they believe they must slime Talarico in every way possible since, if he “is allowed to explain himself and his theological views, free of the slander against him, the most conservative religious voter might come to the conclusion that despite being a Democrat, he’s still a good Christian.” Stoehr adds,
As was the case during Donald Trump’s three campaigns, what matters to many voters isn’t leadership or policy or character. What matters is the collective desire to punch down on people whom the mob believes are deserving of it. (In this case, Talarico is associated with LGBTQ folks.) GOP campaigns are now like Vegas: what’s done there stays there. They are vacations from morality, excuses to indulge in deviance and depravity. That Texans would suffer by electing [Republican candidate Ken] Paxton doesn’t change the fact that they think slandering “Soy Boy” is fun.
Given that Trump and rightwing Christians want to return America to their idealized view of the 1950s, it’s interesting to look at Ginsberg’s depiction from that period. As he saw it, the machinery of modern America consisted of money, war, government and soul-crushing conformity. In his long howl of a poem, he gives us images that we recognize:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks! Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men! Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments! Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb! Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smokestacks and antennae crown the cities! Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!… Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
What with the Trump family’s boundless greed and pay-to-play corruption, along with the president’s love of bombing, his attacks on environmental regulation, his promotion of fossil fuels (smokestacks that “crown the cities”), his paving over the rose garden and the White House lawn, his soulless skyscrapers and other “cement and aluminum” temples to himself (“granite cocks” sounds about right), his “crossbone soulless”prisons, his desecration of national parks and other hallowed institutions, his “Congress of sorrows,” Ginsberg could well be describing the aspirations of Project 2025.
“Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!” Check and check.
For all its apocalyptic despair, however, “Howl” ends on a note of hope as Ginsberg imagines America awakening to its potential. Although despair over the American dream has driven one of the “best minds”–his socialist friend Carl Solomon–to drugs and to incarceration at the Rockland Psychiatric Center, Ginsberg imagines that dream triumphing in the end. It will resurrect like Jesus “from the superhuman tomb” and we will “wake up electrified out of the coma.” In an inversion of war imagery, our “own souls’ airplanes” will drop angelic bombs,” the imaginary walls will collapse (what William Blake called “the mind forg’d manacles”), and we will run outside in our underwear, free at last. “O starry spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here”:
I’m with you in Rockland where you will split the heavens of Long Island and resurrect your living human Jesus from the superhuman tomb I’m with you in Rockland where there are twentyfive thousand mad comrades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale I’m with you in Rockland where we hug and kiss the United States under our bedsheets the United States that coughs all night and won’t let us sleep I’m with you in Rockland where we wake up electrified out of the coma by our own souls’ airplanes roaring over the roof they’ve come to drop angelic bombs the hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls collapse O skinny legions run outside O starry-spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is here O victory forget your underwear we’re free I’m with you in Rockland in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-journey on the highway across America in tears to the door of my cottage in the Western night
Although dreaming in the face of a suffocating reality (or, for that matter, Trumpism) may lead to madness, Ginsberg tells us that it can also lead to freedom. The poem ends with that archetypal journey, the western Odyssey, where new possibilities open up. The American dream doesn’t die just because there are setbacks.
My Ginsberg experience: I was invited to a dinner with Ginsberg when he came to St. Mary’s College of Maryland to see his friend Lucille Clifton and can report that he was interested in everything. When I told him that my research field was 18th century British literature, he rhapsodized about the mad poet Christopher Smart, author of the very Ginsbergian poem “Jubilate Agno.” (“For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry./ For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him.”) When I mentioned that I was writing an article on Jean Renoir’s 1939 film Rules of the Game, he reported that he saw the film in the 1940s with Neal Cassady. Later that evening, he mesmerized a packed auditorium by having us sing a stanza from Blake’s “Nurse’s Song” repeatedly for 20+ minutes as he accompanied us on a harmonium.
Friday – A Life Lived in Literature, 37th Installment
Note: For the purposes of this on-going memoir I am revising an essay I wrote three years ago. It has to do with a tinge of regret, one I have never been entirely able to overcome, that I chose a slightly wrong academic path. Marlon Brando’s lament in On the Waterfront–“I could have been a contender”—sometimes nags at me when I think about not having made a name for myself in literary studies.
I actually had a “what could have been” thrown at me when I was still a student at Carleton College, although it was then connected with history rather than literature. “If you hadn’t been so involved in running the paper [the Carletonian],” my advisor Carl Weiner said to me shortly before graduation, “you could really have been something.” Rather than taking on a year-long history project, I had chosen the short essay that everyone else wrote (although mine wasn’t short). My committee gave it an honors designation but I see what he meant.
I share this rumination, not only because it is self-revealing (a major goal of this memoir), but because I suspect we all have had regrets that we blow out of proportion. My real issue, I now realize, is anxiety over not having been perfect. It’s a form of pride that plagues Sir Gawain in the 14th century romance, one of my all-time favorite works, leading the Green Knight to intervene and bring him down to earth. Sure, you screwed up, but you’re still impressive, he essentially tells our hero in the poem’s finale, and I hear him saying the same to me. I find absolution, along with a deep sense of relief, in his words:
You are so fully confessed, your failings made known, And bear the plain penance of the point of my blade, I hold you polished as a pearl, as pure and as bright As you have lived free of fault since first you were born.
Why, after all, should I complain, having had a rich and fulfilling career teaching works that I love to students who came to care about them as well? The power of memoir writing, I’m discovering, is that one can dive into these thoughts and see them in an entirely new light. With that in mind, here’s that past post.
Reprinted from June 29, 2023 (slightly amended)
In his frequently quoted but often misunderstood “The Road Not Taken,” Robert Frost predicts that one day in the future he will look back at his life and regret a choice he made. (“I shall be telling this with a sigh/ Somewhere ages and ages hence…”) While the poem is often read as a triumphant assertion of having made an unconventional choice—I have heard it quoted in this vein at a couple of valedictory addresses—I read it rather as someone who foresees that he will be so upset at having made that choice that he predicts he will try to rationalize it away: he will convince himself that he took the daring path, not the path that most people walk. In point of fact, however, he acknowledges that there wasn’t that much difference between the two paths, that they were worn more or less the same. (But maybe he’s misremembering this as well.)
In other words, although he would like to think he will look back with a contented sigh, he fears he will look back with a regretful sigh. The poem, after all, is entitled, “The Road Not Taken,” not “The Road Less Traveled.”
Having reached an age (72) where one looks back, especially after having just attended one’s 50th college reunion, I use today’s post to sort through one of my own career regrets. You’ll have to excuse me if I descend into the weeds of my profession—what has bothered me may will seem trivial to those in other walks of life.
I begin my self-examination with a professor that I mentioned in a PechaKucha talk I gave at the reunion. PechaKucha, of Japanese origin, allows the speaker 20 slides in just under seven minutes to make the presentation (20 seconds per slide, which change automatically so that the speaker can’t drone on). Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with my subject, which was how Beowulfhelps us negotiate our gun-happy society. I contended that if we are to stand up to resentment-crazed trolls and counteract dragon depression, we need to “be like Beowulf.” The talk outlined the ways how.
The first slide mentioned Phil Niles’s Medieval History I class, which introduced me to the idea that the monsters in Beowulfrepresented the forces that threatened the stability of 8th century Anglo-Saxon warrior society. In the social contract between warrior and king, warriors were to be loyal, giving all their winnings to their king, and kings were to be fair and generous, redistributing those winnings to the warriors. If either side broke that contract—if warriors behaved like resentful trolls or if kings became greedy dragons—society could disintegrate, with death or slavery the end result for all its members.
I vividly remember writing my essay for the course, which I entitled “The Social Role of Monsters in Barbarian Society.” Understanding came to me at around two or three in the morning in one of Carleton’s all-night study rooms. At that moment I grasped, in a deep way, that literature, including the literary fantasy that I loved, was not just for fun but articulated life and death issues. While I already knew the books I read were of immense importance to me, I now realized they were of immense importance to society as a whole. After all, Beowulfhad served as a blueprint to Anglo-Saxon warriors on how to literally survive.
Socially conscious as we all were in those days, what with the Black, Chicano and Indian liberation movements, the anti-war protests, and the feminist revolution all in full sway, this view that my literature, my personal passion, could help change the world hit me with seismic force. I determined that I would become a literature teacher.
Majoring in history rather than in English was not the way to go about this, however. By my junior year, however, I feared that I was too far along in history to make the transition. Furthermore, none of the English courses I was taking spoke to this new-found revelation. Whereas my English professors seemed more interested in confining themselves to the works rather than linking them to anything going on in the world, my history teachers were introducing me to thinkers who argued that ideas could have a transformational impact.
These thinkers included Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Antonio Gramsci, and Georg Lukacs. In my French courses, meanwhile, I was reading Jean Jacques Rousseau and Denis Diderot, who thought the same. I wrote my thesis on the absurdly broad topic (but undergraduates are allowed to go big) of whether the French Enlightenment caused the French Revolution. I concluded that works like Rousseau’s On Inequalityand Diderot’s Letter on the Blindhad changed the framework in which reality itself was seen. This new reality, I argued, undermined traditional monarchical beliefs.
It helped that, as I was writing my thesis, I was also taking Barry Casper’s “Revolutions in Physics” class. (I had put off this science requirement to the very last moment.) Casper introduced us to Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions,and I realized later that my thesis was essentially contending that the French Enlightenment had ushered in a significant paradigm shift.
But while my history major was speaking to issues that concerned me deeply, it wasn’t preparing me for graduate English programs. I was rejected by six of the nine schools I applied to, and I could understand why when I entered Emory University’s English program. After all, my fellow grad students could perform acts of literary interpretation that appeared magical to me. How were they detecting intricate image patterns beneath a work’s surface?
So was my first wrong path choosing to major in history rather than English? Actually, fearing that this was indeed a mistake, at the beginning of my junior year I planned to tell my history advisor Carl Weiner—a brilliant if somewhat obstreperous intellectual—that I wanted to change majors. At the last moment, however, I lost my nerve. Some cowardice entered into my decision making.
Then again, I would not have taken Phil Niles’s Medieval History class if I had changed majors, nor all those intellectual history classes. And I would probably have experienced, in further English classes, the same frustrations that had sent me to study history in the first place.
Despite having taken only six English courses, I was accepted into a good graduate program. It so happens that my Emory mentor had chosen me in part because of my history background. J. Paul Hunter, a giant in the field of 18thcentury British Literature, liked my interdisciplinary interests, and he and I saw eye to eye about the importance of history.
I was also fortunate that Emory’s Victorianist, Jerome Beaty, was interested in the emerging field of reader response theory. When, my first semester, I heard Beaty talk about how readers in 1847 would have responded to Jane Eyre,I felt a shock of recognition. I tracked him down after the talk and got the names of the theorists he was referencing, including the German theorist Hans Robert Jauss.
Jauss argues that great works of literature expand readers’ “horizon of expectations”—a paradigm shift, if you will—which was exactly what I wanted to believe. I wrote an essay that semester in Beaty’s “Early Dickens Novels” class about how Dickens challenged and expanded traditional notions of the family in Martin Chuzzlewit—with the effect that the novel was a flop when it came out (it was ahead of its time) but one of Dickens’s most popular novels by the end of his life (third after David Copperfield and Pickwick Papers). Dickens had expanded his readers’ horizons so that, despite their early dislike, they later came to see his novel with new eyes.
If you’re keeping track, my decision to major in history turns out not to have been a mistake after all. It got me into a graduate school where people considered history an important part of literary study—unusual for the time as New Historicism had not yet come into fashion—and my Emory PhD helped me find what was for me the perfect job: a state school with a mission to introduce a liberal arts education to (among others) first generation college students.
But wait, I’m not done yet with regrets. When, still in grad school, I was discussing a possible dissertation topic with Hunter, I said something to the effect of wanting to study how novels could change lives. Unfortunately, I narrowed my articulation too much. I thought that I needed to study satire, having the impression that satire was more effective at changing lives than other genres. He, hearing this, suggested that I take on the work of an under-appreciated satiric novelist (and former ship surgeon) Tobias Smollett and I dutifully did so.
This in spite of the fact that I can’t stand Smollett, largely because he is such a cranky writer. In fact, fellow novelist Laurence Sterne referred to him as “Smelfungus” for the way he complains all the time. While I dutifully wrote on Smollett, producing an acceptable dissertation (“Smollett’s Struggle for a New Mode of Expression”), I could never return to him later. As one’s dissertation often serves as the source of one’s early scholarly articles, I cut myself off from that opportunity.
The path I wish I had taken was choosing a topic that focused on reader response issues. Rather than selecting a single author, I could have chosen a theoretical focus and explored a range of 18th century texts. I could, for instance, have followed more closely the kind of research Hunter himself was doing. For instance, he had recently written a brilliant article entitled “The Loneliness of the Long Distant Reader,” in which he talked about how novels were disrupting social order by introducing a new kind of solitude. Wives, for instance, would sometimes distress their husbands by disappearing for days into Samuel Richardson’s million-word novel Clarissa.
Had I said, “I want to do the kind of research that you did in that article,” I would have written a very different dissertation. I would have dived into 18th century reading journals, letters in which books are mentioned, and other documents and other forms of evidence as to the impact of works. I would have built a career in reader response theory, then in its infancy, instead of jumping between multiple fields.
I also would have become the kind of scholar my father was. More on this in a moment.
Instead, having written a dissertation more from the intellect than from the heart, I turned away from writing literary scholarship altogether (at least for a while) and instead started analyzing films. After all, I could see vividly the impact that cinema had on audiences—why, for instance (to cite my most widely cited article) Citizen Kaneshook 1941 viewers to the core. But I could have been doing the same with literature.
In short, I had committed a scholarly no-no: I left a field where I had considerable expertise to branch into something new.
Mentioning my father points to an Oedipal drama at work. Scott Bates, a French professor at the University of the South, was a world authority on the poetry of Guillaume Apollinaire. During a Fulbright year when I was a year old, he had uncovered source material at France’s national library that upended previous interpretations, and he continued to do so for decades afterward. For 15 years I considered myself an impostor because I wasn’t doing something comparable.
I should add that I worshipped my father, seeing in him everything I wanted to be. I was even proud when, in seventh grade, I began wearing glasses because he wore glasses. You see what I mean.
But instead of becoming a recognized scholar, I became what some contemptuously dismiss as a generalist. St. Mary’s College of Maryland, a small liberal arts college, allowed this so that, at any moment, I could be found teaching one of our three survey courses—everything from Beowulfto Margaret Atwood—or one of a wide assortment of theme courses. Over the years these included Minority Lit, African American Lit, Post-Colonial Lit, American Fantasy, British Fantasy, Magical Realism, American Film, Film Genre, Great Directors, Theories of the Reader,and The Existential Fantasies of Haruki Murakami. Although my two favorite courses were in my field (Restoration and 18thCentury Couples Comedyand Jane Austen), ranging as widely as I did was not a recipe for scholarly achievement.
Where I went deep was in responding to student essays. Figuring that everyone had the potential to undercover meaningful literary insights, I spent hours helping students choose their topics, develop their proposals, and draft and polish their essays.
Even after 35 years, this never got old. I reached the point where I could detect—sometimes from no more than a phrase—the topic that would yield an essay where the student had “something at stake” (the phrase I used in my syllabus). I’ve shared a number of these student reading stories on this blog.
While I flourished as a teacher, however, my traditional scholarship was mostly missing. Although I was to publish twenty academic articles, deliver a score of scholarly presentations, and self-publish a book on Beowulf, it’s not a resumé that would earn tenure at a research university. The book I’m proudest of was published at a small press after I retired.
Arguably, my greatest achievement is this blog. My audience is not composed of specialists in the field, however.
As I look back at this career, my version of Frost’s regretful sigh is that I didn’t produce the work that I thought I was supposed to.
Could I have gone as far as those of my stellar Carleton classmates who have had brilliant scholarly careers? One of them heads the Emory Philosophy Department while another received a rave review in The New York Review of Books. Reunions can alert us to roads we haven’t taken.
And yet, to reverse course once again, I have had students tell me that my teaching impacted them in ways that were life-changing, and this blog has reached a wider readership than I ever could have hoped for from scholarly work. While it’s not what my father did nor what various of my professors hoped from me, in the end I fulfilled my main professional mission, which was to put people in contact with literature that bettered their lives. When my old regrets flair up, I remind myself of this.
And to do justice to our 50th class reunion, what I carried away was a sense, not of expectations unfulfilled, but of lives lived fully and meaningfully. Professional goals seem less important now that many of us have retired.
In his short story “The Garden of Forking Paths,” Jorge Luis Borges gives us an alternative to Frost’s yellow wood. Whereas the speaker in “Road Not Taken” agonizes over a single choice, Borges describes a garden where the choices are infinite. As a character tells the narrator,
The Garden of Forking Paths is a picture, incomplete yet not false, of the universe such as Ts’ui Pen conceived it to be. Differing from Newton and Schopenhauer, your ancestor did not think of time as absolute and uniform. He believed in an infinite series of times, in a dizzily growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times. This web of time – the strands of which approach one another, bifurcate, intersect or ignore each other through the centuries – embraces every possibility. We do not exist in most of them. In some you exist and not I, while in others I do, and you do not, and in yet others both of us exist. In this one, in which chance has favored me, you have come to my gate. In another, you, crossing the garden, have found me dead. In yet another, I say these very same words, but am an error, a phantom.
And further on:
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures and in one of them I am your enemy.
This image shows me I have been too one-dimensional in thinking about my life trajectory. Life indeed has “innumerable futures,” which are too complex to chart. I’m especially struck by the thought that sometimes a path that seems to diverge will then later converge, and that a path that bifurcates into two will then see those two intersect. A history class that I wouldn’t have taken had I majored in English gave me the literary insight that has guided my life. The history major that kept me out of a number of graduate schools got me into one that gave me the thinkers that I needed and helped me land my dream job.
Frost’s poem, which jumps back and forth in time, tells me the same thing. Don’t fixate on a single narrative about a wrong or right decision—don’t spend time regretting that you took this path rather than that one—because the very story you tell yourself about that choosing will change over time.
Better for me to focus on the rich interactions with people that teaching literature has made possible, which is a far more interesting story than that of a hypothetical path not taken.
One further thought. I didn’t mention another life choice I made which, while it ran counter to the path of a traditional literary scholar, has added immeasurably to my life. In 1987, inspired by recent Hungarian films, I applied for a Fulbright to go study them, even though I didn’t know any Hungarian. Although I had experienced early academic success with an article on the Czech New Wave—how film played a major role in the Czech Spring of 1968–jumping to another country made no scholarly sense.
In any event, the Hungary slot was not available so I ended up in Yugoslavia/Slovenia instead. This seemed like a worthy second choice since Yugoslavia itself was producing fascinating films. Unfortunately, those films were being produced in Serbia and Croatia, not Slovenia. My research plans fell through and, from outer appearances, the decision appeared to have been a bust.
Except that it wasn’t as I developed deep ties with people in the country. The relationship with Slovenia has led to some of the happiest moments of Julia’s and my life. We have been returning every two years for a six-week stint at the University of Ljubljana and recently received a special award from the university. We use these visits to refresh our many friendships. In addition, my understanding of literature grew immensely from this immersion in another country, enriching my stateside teaching.
Would I trade all this for a straight-line scholar’s path? On reflection, I don’t think I would.
With the NBA finals underway, I follow up the story, mentioned last week, about basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal writing “An Interdisciplinary Approach to Mentorship through the Lens of the Epic Poem The Odyssey.” The thesis was for LSU’s Sports Leadership program. Sadly, I don’t have more information so today’s post merely speculates about how he might have applied Homer’s poem.
Early in the poem we encounter two mentor figures, including Mentor himself (!), who are counseling young Telemachus. Actually, the mentors are Athena, who has taken the guise of first Mentes and then Mentor, but that’s the Greek way of saying that the two men are providing god-like advice. A 19-year-old rookie, Telemachus doesn’t know how to deal with his mother’s suitors, who have invaded the house and are squandering his inheritance. He botches his first confrontation with them—let’s call it his debut appearance on the basketball court—as they successfully threaten him and the sympathetic villagers after he calls a village council. At the end of the session, Telemachus cries in frustration.
Simply calling the council is a growth step for him, however, and Mentor seeks to build on this by essentially sending him to the B league. Figuring that he needs to practice leadership in an environment where he can succeed, Mentor advises him to gather a group of youngsters and take a somewhat challenging sea voyage. Telemachus passes the test and also gains confidence and inspiration after talking to two veterans, Nestor and Menelaus. Both confirm that he has promise, and he returns to Ithaka with a new stride in his step.
He also wins the reluctant admiration of the suitors, who have sent out a ship to intercept and kill him. “Friends,” says one of them,
face up to it; that young pup Telemachus, has done it; he made the round trip, though we said he could not.
Fortunately from him, his team has just acquired a superstar—his father—who takes over, pushing Telemachus into a secondary role. It’s what he needs, however, to develop his own talent. He recognizes this and embraces the occasion.
Odysseus brings with him a lot of hard-won wisdom. If we think of his journey home as his previous basketball career, everything starts off well before going off the rails. The Aeolus gives him a bag of winds that take him to within sight of Ithaka, but because he has failed to communicate adequately with his teammates, they open up the bag and are blow back to the now-angry wind god.
In the subsequent journey, Odysseus’s desire to try new things, which is the source of his greatness, also gets him in trouble with the cannibalistic Laestrygonians and Polyphemus the cyclops. In both instances, his teammates just want to grab some loot and go but Odysseus’s curiosity pushes him further, getting a number of them killed.
Lessons abound. On the plus side, this same intelligence gets Odysseus out of tight spots (Polyphemus’s cave). On the negative, his cocky trash talk—boasting to Polyphemus about what he’s done—provides bulletin board material for the opposition. Suddenly Poseidon is on his case.
Life in the NBA offers players many of the temptations (drugs, sex, loot) that show up in the poem, where we watch Odysseus struggle to keep his team focused. The Lotus Eaters tempt with drugs and Circe tends with bestial appetites (she turns men into pigs), and the men are fortunate that they have a leader who keeps his eyes on the prize. This trait also saves Odysseus from the Sirens. (“They got some hungry women there and they really make a mess outa you,” as Bob Dylan would say.)
Odysseus knows how to accept coaching, which he gets from Teiresias in the Underworld and from Circe. This allows him to negotiate situations where there are no good options, a situation basketball teams know well. When the Knicks take on the Spurs, will they collapse down on 7’4” Victor Wenbanyama, thereby leaving themselves open to three-point shooters, or defend him with a single player, in which case they will give up easy baskets. Do they go man-to-man or play zone? There will be costs in both cases, but the goal is to win the game. Odysseus chooses to sacrifice six men to the monster Scylla rather than giving up his entire ship to the whirlpool Charybdis.
And then there’s that part of the season where you sink into mediocrity (Circe’s island) and all appears lost. Do you just give up, sitting around moping, or do you do something dramatic. Odysseus, buoyed by a divine sense of mission—Zeus has decreed he must return home—builds a raft and risks the treacherous seas.
Sometimes at such moments we see teams make daring trades, which sometimes work out (Odysseus, after many struggles, reaches the island of the Phaeacians, who endow him with gifts and send him home), and sometimes not (teams sometimes mortgage their future to acquire players that fail to save them from drowning).
Back home, Odysseus must now prepare for the big game. The odds are formidable as Odysseus can field no more than four men (unless one counts Athena) while there are 108 suitors. Nevertheless, despite his age, he possesses remarkable fighting skills, along with the element of surprise. Telemachus, meanwhile, proves a worthy second–Scotti Pippen to his father’s Michael Jordan—and the underdogs win.
While this post has been fun to write, I would much rather have reported on the actual content of Shaq’s thesis. He may have encountered the poem in the many hours of interdisciplinary course work his program required, and I can see how he came up with the idea. I would love to know the specific games, coaches, players, and situations it brought to mind.
